Perpetuities with thin tails revisited

Paweł Hitczenko, Jacek Wesołowski

Published 2009-12-09, updated 2010-02-08Version 3

We consider the tail behavior of random variables $R$ which are solutions of the distributional equation $R\stackrel{d}{=}Q+MR$, where $(Q,M)$ is independent of $R$ and $|M|\le 1$. Goldie and Gr\"{u}bel showed that the tails of $R$ are no heavier than exponential and that if $Q$ is bounded and $M$ resembles near 1 the uniform distribution, then the tails of $R$ are Poissonian. In this paper, we further investigate the connection between the tails of $R$ and the behavior of $M$ near 1. We focus on the special case when $Q$ is constant and $M$ is nonnegative.